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You could say I’m a content marketing evangelist. I’ve written a book about it (Content Marketing Revolution) and I’m just finishing my second book on the subject. I believe in it. I help other businesses to do it. It works.

But not everyone gets it right. One of the reasons that some content marketers fail to see an increase in actual customers is that they get so lost in the idea of “not selling” that their activities stop moving prospects along the buyer’s journey. Regardless of how engaging your content is, if you aren’t selling later down the line, your efforts may be all for nothing.

Don’t loose sight of the fact that selling is the ultimate aim of all marketing activity, so it makes sense to be thinking about the endgame throughout all of your activities. Even if the purpose of your content marketing is to attract or build a relationship with your audience, you always want it to lead to a sale.

If you’re creating great content without thinking about how it contributes to a sale, you might as well be blasting it up into space and expecting a return.

In my book, I talk a lot about identifying your audience (or target customers) and building your content efforts around influencing these groups. A big part of this is getting to grips with the buyer’s journey and working out exactly what they need at each stage. If you align all of your content marketing activity to the journey you want customers to travel, your content will be working for both the customer and you.

Whether you realise it or not, your content already appeals to specific stages of the buyer’s journey, so it’s important that you acknowledge these milestones in the way you deliver it: from tone and purpose, to considerations about branding and calls to action, etc.

While the principles of content marketing might be right for hooking in your audience and building a long-lasting relationship at certain points in the journey, the same principles might not be right when you get closer to the sale. Take a logical approach to how you communicate with your customers and remember that there comes a time in every buyer’s journey that more direct, sales-led content is crucial. Don’t allow content marketing to cloud certainty about your product at the sharp end of the sale.

The bottom line is: if you want to improve the impact content marketing is having on sales, it is crucial that you recognise when to use apply the principles of content marketing and when to use content to all out sell.